Search

I’ve been enjoying plancast – similar to foursquare, which I don’t really use, but instead of saying where you *are*, you say where you *will be*. And for meaningful places, ie industry events, not just checking in because you have to be at the dry cleaners.

In my homepage revamp, I decided to integrate my next event using my plancast feed. However, the feed doesn’t provide much in the way of timing details. There’s no human-friendly format (“in 3 days”) and in fact, there’s no structured date format (i.e. 12092840482 seconds after 1970), and in fact, there’s not even a specific field for the time at all. It just appears in the “description” field, and it appears in different ways, i.e. a single date vs. a date range. (And different again if it spans two months, and if it spans two years, hmmm, it doesn’t seem to be working yet for that – ).

So I wrote a custom parser to deal with it. It accepts the “description” string from the RSS feed: